House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Sunday on MSNBC’s “Weekends” that President Donald Trump has “no moral compass” and was “entertaining” former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s call for a “military coup.”
Witt asked, “Is there any chance, sir, that Joe Biden will not be validated again as the winner of this election?”
Schiff said, “There’s no chance of that, what there is a chance of is if the president essentially urges his supporters to descend on the Congress on January 6th that it could cause civil disturbances. What’s more, the fact of challenging the result in Congress will fail, but it will do another body blow to our democracy. All of this is doing long-term damage to our country. The president, through his actions, is creating a permanent class of citizens who believe their election was stolen when it wasn’t.”
Witt said, “A number of new reports are detailing the length to which the president was reportedly willing to go to overturn the election results. I want to play for you some advice that Michael Flynn has for him. Let’s take a look.”
In a clip from Newsmax, Flynn said, “He could order within the swing states, if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities, and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election in each of those states. It’s not unprecedented. There’s people talking about martial law. Martial law has been instituted 64 times.”
Schiff said, “I have to say, I shutter every time I see Michael Flynn to think that that man was the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. What he’s just saying is perfectly normal, perfectly ordinary, done 60-some odd times in history is a military coup. That’s what he’s talking about. I’ve resisted using the word coup to describe these efforts by Trump to make these bogus lawsuits and make these bogus claims, but what Flynn’s talking about a military coup. That may have done 60 times in history, but it’s been done by dictators around the world, not in the United States.”
He added, “Could the president do it? I don’t think the people around the president are going to go along with it. It would fail. But it would be such an additional destructive blow to our democracy. The fact that they’re entertaining this is so beyond the pale. But, again, this is a man who has no moral compass. He will do the length and breadth of what people let him get away with. Sadly, he’s had all too many enablers in his own administration and the Republicans in Congress, and that’s what even breeds this kind of reckless talk.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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